The School of Greatness - 78 The Ultimate Guide to Book Marketing (and Selling Thousands of Books Yourself) with Tucker Max

Episode Date: July 31, 2014

"The most important thing for marketing anything is having something that people want." - Tucker Max Learn from the best. Tucker Max describes what it takes to publish and market a best selling book. To learn more and get the details on publishing and marketing go to www.lewishowes.com/78

This is episode number 78 with number one New York Times best-selling author, Tucker Max. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. What is up, everyone? Thanks so much for tuning in today on another episode of The School of Greatness.

Got a good buddy of mine on today. I'm super pumped up. Been wanting to get Tucker Max on for a while. It's taken 78 episodes and you're in luck. We actually recorded two different episodes with him. In this first episode, it's all about how to become an amazing marketer with your book and how to sell a ton of books. Now, for those that don't know Tucker Max, he is one of only, I think,

three people who's had three different books on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. That's pretty much almost impossible to do. And this guy is a machine at selling books, at marketing books, at writing them, and at having them go viral because there's such a great content in the books. So you guys are in for a special treat today. And I don't even know if Tucker's actually been talking about this as much. So you may not be able to get this content anywhere else with him talking about it because I think he's just starting to do interviews. So you're in luck.

This is all about the ultimate book marketing guide. And his newest book is called Create a Bestseller by Yourself. And it's all about what he has learned over the years and the information from Ryan Holiday and a couple of the people on his team, where they've done dozens of campaigns of bestsellers, sold millions of copies of books, and all of their methods and details on how to become a bestseller, of books and all of their methods and details on how to become a bestseller, how to market and sell thousands and thousands of copies yourself is in this book and in this podcast. He's going to be really breaking down the key principles for building an awesome marketing campaign for your book.

So you guys are in for a treat today with this episode and I'm very pumped to bring on Tucker here in just a second. I'm very pumped to bring on Tucker here in just a second. Now, let's get into the juicy details of how to create a bestseller by yourself with the one and only Mr. Tucker Max. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness podcast. I'm with my good man, Tucker Max. What's up, Tucker? What's up, Lewis?

I am excited about this episode. And actually, I don't know if you've done many podcasts, except for now you have one out. But I haven't seen you kind of do the rounds. And I don't know if that's on purpose or if I'm just missing that. Well, I think for a while, podcasts have only gotten big in the last two years or so. And my last book came out in 2012 and they kind of came out before podcasts really blew up. So I haven't really had a reason to go around

and be like, oh, I'm promoting nothing. I'm just here. I feel you. Well, now you do have something to promote. You've got your own podcast, which is called The Mating Grounds, right? Yes. And I just listened to an episode. It was really good. We'll get on that here

towards the end, but you're really well known for a lot of things, but being a great writer and a hilarious writer and basically creating a new category on the New York Times list in essence, right? Yep. And you have three books. I think they're all three still on the New York Times list in essence, right? Yep. And you had three books.

I think they're all three still on the New York Times list. Is that right? I don't know if they are right now, but me and Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis are the only authors to ever have three books on the nonfiction list at the same time. At the same time. It's so ridiculous.

You know you're making bank when you got three books on the list for a long time. Yep. Congrats on all the success there. And basically, now people come to you, authors come to you, major authors and ask for your advice and your consulting on book marketing because you've just repeated it over and over and over. And whenever you help someone, they pretty much repeat your success. So you, you and Ryan have put together a new book, and it's over at bookstrapper.com slash marketing. And what's the book actually called, Creating a Bestseller?

It's called The Bookstrapper Guide to Book Marketing, Creating a Bestseller by Yourself. Gotcha. And there's so many, you know, it's so challenging these days to get on the New York Times list. It's actually easy for some people and challenging for a lot of people. And once you understand kind of the tools and the strategies on how to get there, I think you're going to give yourself a much greater opportunity. And there's a lot of people who are coming out with books more than ever. I don't even know the numbers. You probably have better stats than I do. Hundreds of thousands of books a year. Seriously.

A year. If you're including self-publishing too you're looking at upwards i think last year was like 400 000 books were published 400 000 i'm serious if you include self-publishing and a big part of that too is like so uh like there's companies that have these algorithms that will print out like sort of they will scrape the internet and and like do books based on you know like like linux stuff or something. They'll sell only 20 copies, but because it's essentially a computer program writing them, it's all upside. So real books published by real people, you're looking at about 100,000.

100,000. Okay. 100,000 books a year are probably going to continue to increase by 20% or 30% a year, I'm assuming, for a little bit. At least. At least, right? Yeah. And there's only, what, 20 on the New York Times bestseller list every week? Yeah, 25. I forget what their list is. It might be 30. It kind of depends. But right, there's different categories. But yeah, you're looking at less than 100 or so that are getting on the list each week. In all the different categories. Gotcha.

It's crazy. So the chances of actually getting there are less than, I guess that's less than one, like a quarter of a percent or something, less than that of making on the list. And you've done it a number of times. And plus, if you go to bookstrapper.com slash marketing, you can see all the other people

that have followed Tucker and his strategies. And he's got a number of books up here listed who followed it, who have made the New York Times bestseller list. So it's not by accident of what he's doing and what he's teaching for other authors to do. So what are some things that you can talk about in this book? Obviously, the book has got pretty much everything. It's the definitive guide. So everyone make sure to go out there and check it out. And the people who are listening on the School of Greatness, there are a lot of experts and entrepreneurs. I highly recommend writing your own book if you want to become a bigger expert and get your brand out

there as it's going to support that. So make sure to check out this book. But what are some things that authors need to know about just kind of getting started? Whether they're going to publish it themselves or get a major publisher, what do they need to know about marketing their book? So here's the thing, Lewis. Marketing a book is not fundamentally different than marketing other things, at least in sort of in a meta-analysis. The most important thing for marketing anything is having something that people want, right? And so you wouldn't believe how many authors come to us and they're like, oh, I'm writing a book about how to crochet underwater. Get me on the bestseller list. And I'm like, no, it's not possible. That's fucking stupid. No one cares. Maybe there are 100 people that care and that's great. Write the book for them. Right?

The first thing you have to do if you really want a book on a bestseller list is you have to think, are there a lot of people who care about what I'm writing about? I'm talking about nonfiction. For fiction, it's a little bit different. Fiction you have to write a great book and there's a lot of different ways to do that and that's sort of its own discussion. Nonfiction you don't have to write a great book. It doesn't have to be really articulately written in beautiful sentences and everything is like, you know, birds and flowers and trees. You know, everything you read like blows your mind. No, it just has to have really good information that people value a lot and they

think that that will help them, right? And most people don't. Most people's books are very self-centered. They're very much about themselves or what they want to talk about, or they don't explain things well. They don't teach things well. Very few people actually think about what other people will think of their book. They only write for their own reasons, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that, but that's called a diary. There's no reason to sell that. You know what I'm saying? Right. So, I mean, think about like you would never ask if you're talking about a consumer product like food or something. You never ask, oh, you know, do people even want to eat this? Like that's assumed.

Of course, you have to find something that people want to eat that they've already demonstrated they want to eat. Then the question is how do I then market it better? But a lot of people don't even ask that fundamental question for books. Does anyone else care? That's the first thing you need to ask, right? So how do you get enough people care? Well, it's a good question. So generally speaking, I think you can start looking on Amazon. So if there are, like, let's say, whatever, if you really want to write a book about vertical gardening, right? You really like growing stuff indoors,

go to Amazon and look and say, oh wow, there's 50 books on vertical gardening. A lot of people are like, oh, that means all the books are, the space is taken up. No, actually, that means probably that a lot of the books suck. Maybe look at the top one or two and see. If they're really amazing, okay, maybe vertical gardening isn't the way to go. But the point is, if there's 50 books there, that means there's a market. That means a lot of people read stuff on that. And that means writing another book in that category might be a good idea. Now, maybe you don't take the direct sort of thing. Maybe what you're doing is vertical gardening in apartments or something like that, right? All right, so that's a little bit more of a niche.

You think there's less of an audience. But for the audience of people who are vertical gardening in their apartments, that book is going to be the one they buy, not just the generic vertical gardening book because that's the one they think is for them, right? So basic market research. Look at Amazon. Look online. How many blogs are out there? How many people are writing about this subject? How many Twitter accounts? How many Pinterest accounts? Do people care about this? If they do,

then it's probably a good general topic for a book. If they don't, that doesn't automatically mean it's not a good topic, but you need to ask yourself, why is there nothing else out there about this? If it's some brand new subject like some new solar cell that was invented, the reason there's nothing out there is because it was just invented, right? But if it's quilting, well, maybe not many people care. Right. Well, even if there is a lot of successful books out there already, I'm looking at your bookstrapper.com slash marketing and I see the

first book on the left is your personal paleo code. There's probably, from my memory, five to 10 different New York Times bestsellers that are paleo books. At least. At least in the last year. And maybe there's 20, 30. I don't know. So it seems like there's a new paleo book that comes out every couple of months that hits number one. And so there are some instances from what I see that you can basically repeat what someone else has done and just put your own spin on it and it'll still be successful. But that's exactly, you're exactly right. That's exactly what I said. Like that's it. Seeing a lot of competitors doesn't mean you should be scared away. It means there's a lot of demand, right? I'll tell you what I've found is that in most situations,

even very crowded fields have huge, huge amounts of space because most people just blindly imitate someone else. But if you can bring, like you said, bring a new spin on it. Look at Eckhart Tolle. Eckhart Tolle is a perfect example. Yeah, that guy crushes it. Dude, he crushes it. Sells millions of tens of millions

of books all like he does all this amazing stuff right that have you ever read that fucking book it is just the love languages or which one it's just fucking Buddhism which book are we talking about the power of now or the which one of them power of now is just mindfulness like if you read

Han stuff or I mean go down like I actually read a lot of Buddhist literature. Those guys are really smart. They've been around for thousands of years. They've figured a lot of shit out. What Eckhart totally did, and I'm not criticizing him. It's fucking genius actually. What he did was he took a

very complicated but informed subject, Buddhism, and he simplified it to the most basic elements so that someone who watches a TV show like How I Met Your Mother can understand it. Seriously, if you want to,

if your listeners don't know what to do to make money or have their business, I'll tell you right now. The next 20 years are going to see an explosion of people explaining and simplifying and curating very complex subjects for the average person. So if you can take Buddhism and make it and turn it into something someone shops at Target

can understand and use in their life, then you're Eckhart Tolle. For real. That's exactly what he – that motherfucker has not had one original thought in his life. Not one. But he doesn't have to. Exactly, dude. Because here's the thing. No one who shops at Target is ever going to read, you know, like anything from Thich Nhat Hanh.

They're not going to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. They're not going to read the Blue Cliff Notes. They're not going to read those, right? And they're not going to understand them if they do. them if they do. If Eckhart Tolle is smart enough to take those subjects and make them, simplify them, and distill them into very usable, understandable stuff so that Walmart America can get it,

that's an actual service. He's done something. He's created something new. Believe me, I'm not criticizing him because he has helped absolutely unequivocally help people and change their lives. Millions of people have read his books, right? Exactly. No doubt. And seen improvements in their lives. Millions of people read his books, right? Exactly. No doubt.

And seen improvements in their lives. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Dude, I mean, one of our good friends, Tim Ferriss, a good friend of both yours and mine, Tim invented very little in 4-Hour Workweek. What Tim did is take a bunch of ideas from a bunch of different places that people had roughly worked out and put them together into a cogent, coherent thing called lifestyle design, right? Great. I mean, Tim actually did have his own original ideas.

Eckhart totally does not. I don't care what anyone says. That dude just ripped off the Tibetan Book of the Dead and all that sort of thing. But either one is fine, man. Sure. Either one is fine. If you can take difficult, complex things and make normal people understand them and basically sell them, if you can market those ideas better, then you can make a shitload of money and you can actually help people.

It gives people who might be intimidated to write their own book because they don't think they have an original idea. It gives them an opportunity to say, hey, listen, if you don't, it's okay. It might even be better for you not to have an original idea, just to repackage something in a way that people understand it. Yes. I mean, listen, Lewis, I'll apply the exact same logic to the book Ryan and I just wrote. So like Ryan worked for American Apparel for a lot of years and ran marketing there and I sold my own books and whatever. And most, I would say, I would say between Ryan and I, we've had, I don't know, 10 original book marketing ideas, maybe, probably three, actually, if I'm being really honest. What are those?

Can you talk about them? So I think we were the first ones to use – Planned Parenthood? Well, yeah. So I was going to say we're one of the first ones to use stunts, to negative stunts of book marketing. We're one of the first ones to use slide shares for books. We're one of the first ones to really, I think, take advantage of Reddit AMAs for authors. We might not have even invented any of those.

That's why I'm saying if I were to go through and name all the things that we brought to book marketing, I'm not even sure we invented them. I know we thought of them ourselves, but maybe someone else did it before us. I don't know. But the point is, what Ryan and I have done with our book is really take all our experience in marketing all these different things all over the internet and learn from tons of other people, direct marketers or advertising agencies or copywriters or we'll look at how do you sell car, whatever.

All these ideas we've had and we put them all together and then that's what we sold to our clients. That's how we launched For Our Chef for Tim Ferriss. That's how we launched Matt Berry's book, Robert Greene's book, all these number one bestsellers. All we did was combine a bunch of ideas and then put them together. First we provided a service, then we did the book. That's it.

That's all we did. We're no more original than Tim Ferriss or Eckhart Tolle. We're just in a different field. There's so much information out there and so few people that can put it together in a cogent, coherent sort of assemblage for normal people to understand that if you only do that, if you're only explain and simplify things, you can become rich and you'll deserve it. Right. Because people need simple ideas. They need simple steps laid out on how to do things, how to make their life better, business, health, whatever it may be. And if there's no easy way to do it or they can't understand how to do it and what's already available to them, then when you solve someone's problem like that, you can get rich for sure.

Isn't I mean, that's exactly dude. That's that's how all business works is find a problem. Someone has solve it, get them to pay you for it. Right? That's it. Right. Exactly. And so that's how information especially works.

What do people want? Right? Figure out what do they want. I want, remember, don't sell a process. You want to sell a result. You want to sell, I want to be sexier. I want to sell more books. I want to-

Six pack abs. Six pack abs. My God, Mike Geary. We could talk about him all day, right? sell more books. I want six pack abs, six pack, six pack abs. My God, Mike Geary, we can talk about it all day, right? Like, uh, like I want to result and then figure out, okay, how can I provide the informational structure so that people can get that result easily and quickly. If you can do that, you can make a ton of money and you make people's lives better. Yeah, dude. Yeah. I mean, so what should people be thinking about if they want to write a book?

Should they be thinking about, I'm going to take the publishing route and try to sell this thing or self-publish it? What and why? So here's the thing. The only reason to use a mainstream publisher anymore is credibility. Is if you really, actually if you want to hit the New York Times bestseller list, you can do it. Self-publishing is just much harder.

Otherwise, not even credibility. It's just credibility with the mainstream media. Normal people don't give a shit anymore. No one ever thinks because most people buy their books digitally now. E-books have passed physical books in sales. Most people don't think. They don't ever look at the publisher.

What they look at is how professional is this book. They look at the social proof, right? So is the cover professional? Does it look like a good book? Because people judge, absolutely judge books by the covers. You can lament that all you want, but that's the truth. So you need to have a great cover. Then you need to have really professional book description, right?. It needs to really succinctly explain what the book

is, what you're going to learn from it, and then kind of teach you exactly how you're going to learn it, but not fully. You want them obviously to have a reason to buy the book. Then you want some social proof, some blurbs hopefully from people who are in the field that you're trying to sort of talk to. So, for instance, if I was going to write, like, Lewis, if you were to write a book about greatness, you'd want to get blurbs from, like, you know, Tim Ferriss is, like, lifestyle design type and people like that, right? You want to get those people because that's social proof. Then what you want to do is obviously make sure the content is really good. Although the content

is, like, you want to start there, right? So I don't think you even start with publisher or traditional. Your assumption should be I'm going to self-publish the book unless you know your goal is to hit the New York Times bestseller list, right? Right. Because you don't have to, but it makes it way easier. And you have to understand a publisher is not going to care about you unless you already have a big platform. Sure.

Now, first, to hold you there, why does it make it easier when you have a New York Times publisher to make the New York Times list? Why is it easier? Because having a publisher means that you'll be in bookstores, and the New York Times heavily waits for their list. They heavily wait books in bookstores, bookstore sales. That's the only reason. How come you can't get in bookstores if you self-publish?

Because bookstores, right now the only bookstore that matters is Barnes & Noble, and they won't talk to you. Really? Why not? Because, dude, it's hard to understand. When I explain how the book publishing business works to people who are used to being in other businesses, they look at me like I'm retarded because they're like, this can't be how it works. I'm like, no, it really is. It's a bunch of people who – the book publishing business is essentially full of people who think it's their social responsibility to worry about culture and to not actually sell things, which is why it's going out of business. For real. Amazon doesn't think like that.

Amazon wants to sell shit. And they want to sell shit that makes customers happy. Barnes & Noble wants to be high status and highbrow, which is like, if you want to do that, go have a fucking cocktail party on the Upper East Side in your townhome. Don't fucking sell books, right? But whatever. That's just the sort of historical way that book publishing has sort of developed.

So they literally – I'm telling you, you cannot talk to them. They won't talk to you. They will not stock self-published books. Now, what you can do is you can be on Ingram. So you can self-publish. Certain self-publishing sort of companies like Lightning Source or others will put you in Ingram's database, which means that being in locations can order your book. So people can go in and order it. But guess what? We live in the fucking 21st century. No one fucking does that shit anymore.

Either you buy the book on Amazon or if you go to a book source because you want to buy it right away. So there's absolutely no reason to go with a mainstream publishing house unless that's what you care about but here's the thing i we get so many people come to us like oh i want to go to a mainstream publisher and i'm like listen dude they're not going to give you a book deal like why not i'm this and i'm that and and i know all these things and my book's going to be the best i just know it and i'm like listen here this is you can talk to any editor and publishing publishers have finally realized that they don't know how to sell books and that the only thing that sells books now are author platforms. And so if you have a big email list or you have a huge YouTube channel or whatever,

if you have a permission asset where you already can talk to people or a big podcast like you do, Lewis, if you have a way to talk to people that are already listening, then you view a channel, then you are very likely to get a book deal. If you do not have a channel, it's almost impossible. So how are publishers still in business? Because I feel like there's still a lot of publishers out there that are spending a lot of money still, at least from what I hear in my channels. How are they still affording that and making money if they're not selling? There's two ways. A backlist is one of the big ways they make money, right?

So if you go into a bookstore, there's a lot of books there. And a lot of those sell, but they're like Mark Twain or something, you know? Seriously. Or Harry Potter. Sure. Or like the books that sell, sell so much. So many. Right.

That it kind of keeps everything else afloat. It's basically a fat tail economics. The few hits support everyone else. And dude, publishers are in – there's a reason that the two biggest publishers just consolidated, dude. There's a reason that the two biggest publishers just consolidated, dude. I mean they have back lists that keep them afloat, but also like most publishers on a year-over-year basis lose money with acquisitions. And a lot of reasons why that they keep acquiring stuff is to be – I'm telling you, to be relevant in their industry. Wow.

Because like if I'm – They want to have the next big book. They want to like say I've got this guy or this book, right? What they want – they want the next big book that Barnes & Noble wants to stock, right? Because it's so – all right. Here's a great example. Your readers can watch this happen. Lena Dunham is about to come out with a book. You know the girl who does Girls?

She's amazing. Yeah. Right. Well, that's one word for it. Do you know – It's a great – she's great at what she does I think. Well, okay. Do you know how many people watch – well, I mean let's look at the numbers. Do's great at what she does, I think. Well, okay. Do you know how many people watch?

I mean, let's look at the numbers. Do you know how many people watch her show on HBO? No clue. So I think, I'm pretty sure, the highest rated episode of Girls Ever had a little bit over a million viewers. Wow. Do you know what the highest, not the highest,

the average midnight rerun of Big Bang theory on tnt do you know how many viewers that has a million about four million wow right no one watches girls right now girls is very popular with certain people in media it's seen as very high status etc right so lena dunham got a three million dollar advance i think actually a little bit more right her book's going to come out in september it won't it won't even sell 50 000 copies wow So, Lena Dunham got a $3 million advance. I think actually a little bit more, right? Her book's going to come out in September. It won't even sell 50,000 copies. Wow.

So, just for numbers wise, to make back a $3 million advance, she's got to sell a million hard copies. A million! There's no way. There's no way, huh? No, she's going to sell less than 50,000. Because her book will sell in New York, San Francisco, and L.A., and nowhere else. London maybe or something. Right.

It'll sell nowhere else because no one in America gives a shit about her except a certain type of person who's very media savvy and media elite, which is fine. That's a knock on Lena Dunham, right? There's nothing wrong with that. But look at publishing houses didn't give her an advance based on any reasonable metric, but they gave her a big advance because it makes them look good to other media companies, right? I know it sounds crazy and you think there's no way this is the case. It took me years to understand this because it's such kooky nonsense, dude. But that's the way publishing works. So they're willing to spend money on someone just to have them even though they know for a fact they're not going to make their money back on that book.

They probably convinced themselves they could make their money back. Here's one of the other reasons why though. So because – I forget who signed Lena Dunham, Penguin, whatever. Because Penguin signed her, they're going to be able to make Barnes & Noble buy a bunch of other books and a bunch of other copies. And they're going to get really good sort of shelf space. Right. So it's not just status.

It's also how they can trade that status through the media chain. Right. And then what happens is that Lena Dunham book will get a bunch of coverage. It just won't sell at all, okay? But all that coverage is going to justify the purchase. And so the editors will keep their jobs because like, oh, we did everything we could, right? Sure. And like you have to understand, anyone in a corporation understands this.

You don't make decisions based on what makes sense or what's smart or what's rational. You make sense. Emotional decisions. No, you make emotional decisions based on what makes sense or what's smart or what's rational. You make sense. Emotional decisions. No, you make emotional decisions based on what's going to make your boss happy and what keeps you your job. Sure. That's the way publishing works, dude. So is Barnes & Noble going to go out of business anytime soon? Oh, yeah.

They'll probably be bought. They're struggling. They're basically keeping their head afloat. That's a good question. I mean, Borders just went out of business, you know, like a couple years ago. And it would not shock me if Amazon loses, and it looks like they're going to lose

the sales tax battle in all the various states, so eventually online will be taxed the same as local. It would not shock me to see Amazon buy BNN because the only reason they didn't buy bookstores is because they didn't want to have to deal with the sales tax thing. But now I think they're going to lose that battle. They may end up doing that. Although I could see Amazon not skipping over BNN and buying a huge big box retailer and then kind of competing that way. I don't know.

There's a lot of things where Amazon maybe is going to win the sort of same hour, same day delivery sort of thing. I don't know what's going to happen to BNN. Books aren't going anywhere. More people are buying more books and reading them than ever before. I don't think old school publishing is going to be around much longer, but books are definitely not going anywhere. Why are people buying and reading more?

Because it's cheaper and easier and books are better than ever. Well, I mean, if you think about it, books used to be, the only books that were published prior to 1996 or so, the only books that were published were books essentially that convinced, if you could convince the New York literati elite that your book should be published, they would publish it. But that was the whole business. Every publishing company just about

was New York media elite. Now, anyone can publish anything. Dude, Fifty Shades of Grey did not get published mainstream. It got picked up by Random House after she'd sold 5 million copies. And Random House absolutely leveraged their machine and turned it from 5 to 50 million, no doubt. But she would have sold 20 million copies anyway. They maybe helped double her

sales or something like that. But no, dude. Those sorts of books would never have been published ever prior to the internet. What the internet does is it takes the gatekeepers away. So now you don't have essentially 20 or 100 editors in New York deciding what gets published for the entire country. Now anyone can publish anything and the good stuff floats to the top generally speaking. Right, right. Hugh Howey is another example. That dude doesn't exist 20 years ago.

Neither do I, dude. I sent all my stuff out to publishers. Every single one rejected me. Every single one, without exception. I put out my stuff on the internet, blew up, and this is 2001, then got a book deal that way. Crazy. Did you think you were going to finally get

your books out there, or was it because of the internet and putting it out there, you were like're like okay now i see that i could get published dude i i didn't really think about it i was just some some you know uh 25 year old bump living in chicago i had no fucking idea i was just trying to get laid i don't know like i was a nonsense i was full of shit i don't know i didn't think like most of what's happened good to me i've either lucked into or i made a couple of smart decisions uh uh like very little of it has been planned out long term i'm thinking the next 10 20 years i have a little bit of stuff slightly planned out but the first 10 years of success was just luck and pure effort and some things happen you had some talent too i mean you created you

know content that people loved hard i mean like dude most people i'm telling you the vet you know this lewis you know as well as i do talent's nice and talent helps but there's a lot of develop skill a lot of talented people who don't do shit that's true they don't hustle and they don't work on their skill you did hustle hardcore and that's that's why you're successful but let But let's real quick get back to your original – because we're way off track. So your original question is someone can get published. What should they do, right? Yeah. I actually – I used to think that – I've changed my mind on this pretty recently.

I think some of your listeners would be interested in this because I think publishing is going to change again. It used to be if you wanted to write a book, you had to sit down at a computer and spend hours and hours and learn how to write and all this awful shit. And I think there are a lot of great books that could exist that don't because that's what people think book writing is. I actually think you don't need to do that anymore. I think the better thing to do is first start with your idea. What do I have to say that other people care about? Any sort of product growth hacking sort of breakdown. What do I have that other people

will value? Then I think what you do is you, all the tools and technology exist to write a book without having to write it. If you have a great idea, outline your idea. Really think what is it I'm trying to say. Okay, like let's say you're a plumber and you can teach people who aren't plumbers

either how to do basic plumbing things themselves and then how to ask the right questions so your plumber doesn't screw you. That's a really basic book. That's a simple idea. I could totally see that book selling. Instead of writing that, I think what you do is you outline that idea. You come up with a bunch of interview questions. Get someone to interview you or you do it yourself.

I think you talk through each thing. Then you get it transcribed. Send it to a good editor, someone who can take a spoken interview and transcribe it into written words because they're not the same medium. You don't just get a straight transcription. You have to get someone to interpret it essentially from verbal to reading. You have to get someone to interpret it essentially from verbal to reading. Then I think you put it – then do a really professional design, really great cover, really great sort of like a description, etc., and a good website and then I think you put it out that way.

Not everyone should do that. If you can write, you can write. But someone like you, Lewis, like you're a perfect example because you're like very uh very dyslexic right yeah yeah not a great writer no but you're a really smart dude and you have a lot of smart things to say but if you have to sit down and write something like you're gonna fucking put a bullet in your brain exactly well why not just think of okay what am i trying to say what am i what are my 10 things i can teach people or does it all how does it fit together what's the sort of lesson here right and so you figure all that out right put it all down and What am I trying to say? What are my 10 things I can teach people? How does it fit together?

What's the sort of lesson here, right? And so you figure all that out, right? Put it all down an outline and then talk it out. Then take that, maybe even arrange the audio file so it all fits. Then transcribe it. Then get someone to edit it, right? Like, dude, I actually started doing this for book clients. We've had a ton of people come to us, to my publishing company, and they want us to ghostwrite the book. And that's really expensive, right?

That's $50,000, $70,000. So instead of ghostwriting, I'll have one of my assistants run them through this process. And we'll have a book done in about a month to two months. And it will be amazing and they'll be super excited about it. It's only 15,000 to maybe 40,000 words. So it's not super long, right? It doesn't work to maybe 40,000 words, so it's not super long. It doesn't work with novels. This is generally nonfiction.

Nonfiction, yeah. Nonfiction people who have skills or attributes. Information, yeah. Right. They're trying to sell or they're trying to sort of establish authority or credibility and they love it. We can charge them something like anywhere from six to ten grand, so like ten times almost less, somewhere between five to ten times less than ghostwriting and they get an amazing product.

Then we help them do professional cover, all that sort of stuff. And they're totally thrilled and it works amazingly. So I think for most people who are writing books, that's the better way to do it. And just so for people listening who are interested in doing it that way, do you guys open that up to the public or is that just kind of case by case? Could people go somewhere and sign up for that service with you? Right. It's funny. I didn't even come here to talk about this. We just literally launched. I swear to God, you can tell your listeners. When you were asking me, what do I want to talk about, I didn't even think this up. But when you said this, I was like, oh, this is great people might want this it's called we call it book in a box so just go book like book in like i in a box dot co book in a box dot co um and basically what is this the website just went up i think yesterday the day before and it explains the whole process

and and and what it does dude lewis i'll do this for you if you want man like i might be down i won't do this for your listeners at cost for you i'll do it at you if you want, man. I might be down. I won't do this for your listeners at cost. For you, I'll do it at cost if you want. As an example, if you want to try it out, see what it's like. And then if you want, we can put together a special package for your listeners, maybe with a discount, and they could do something like that. I'm down. Because we actually talked about this when you were at my place for South By.

And I'm in the final stages of my proposal. And so I'm going to be writing it soon. I've got almost the whole proposal done, but I'm going to have to write it soon. So this might be something to talk about. So after this, let's talk more about that. Okay, yeah. But cool, yeah, bookinabox.co. So people can go here and they can fill out a form or –

It's just – what it'll do. It just say you're interested. There's a little thing at the bottom. It's a free consultation, right? And I have Zach who, he's my guy. He's really fucking smart. And he helps talk people through it. Because not everyone should be doing a book. Some people really, it would make a lot more sense to do other things. So we kind of figure out, all right, does this make, what are your goals and objectives? Does a book make sense? How much time do you have? It doesn't really take much time. The way we do it, it takes people maybe about 10 to 20 total hours.

We do most of the work. Sure, that's great. That's why you pay. For those that are listening, if you can get a book finished for, it sounds like 15 to 20 grand all in, uh, maybe even more, uh, with,

with a service like this, that is like the biggest steal I've ever even heard of. It's actually less. We generally charge between, I think it's between six and 10. Uh, and that's professional. That goes,

that's idea to fully published professional book, like with a cover, cover, editing, everything, editing, everything. Oh my gosh. That's like a steal. Yeah. With a cover. Cover. Editing. Everything. Editing. Everything. Oh my gosh.

That's like a steal. Yeah. That's incredible. And you'll get it done in probably like a few months. Which as opposed to trying to do it yourself would take you two years. Depending on how responsive you are. It's about two years. Wow.

That's incredible. Well, yeah. Make sure if you guys are interested in that. I'll link it up on the show notes as well. But I'm at bookinabox.co right now at the bottom. I see a little uh form fill out the form if you're interested it's like four little things to fill out and then just put that you're listening to a school of greatness and i'm sure tucker will hook

you up with some type of discount or uh i'll give you a kickback lewis next time when next time when you come stay at my place i'll get you a bed instead of a sofa yeah i've stayed at tucker's uh place in austin a few different times. He's always very welcoming and gracious, and I stayed on the couch the last time. So it reminded me of my days when I was sleeping on my sister's couch. So thank you for that. My pleasure, dude. You're a great guest.

You sent one of the on it kettlebells. Yeah, I actually had dinner with Aubrey the other day. He's a pretty cool dude. Did you? Nice. I've been trying to get you guys to meet for like six months now so i'm glad that happened yeah he's a good dude he is he's a good dude are you using the kettlebell or you like the other dollars oh yeah dude of course i mean kettlebell is like it's one of the best ways

to stay in shape it's amazing yeah very cool well to get back to the book um stuff let's let's go into something you know you could have all this information and you could have a great book and you could write this, you could do everything, you could be out there, but it really doesn't mean shit unless you execute it the right way. And that's something that you and Ryan have done really well with your own books and with clients is the execution process. Now, how does really someone set up the execution process and the marketing behind the book? What should someone be thinking about? Should they be thinking like hiring a team and really three months prior starting to set things in motion?

Is it, you know, obviously there's a lot of, from what I see, a lot of guest posting on single author blogs and in media and things like that and getting that content ready. So what should someone be doing before the book launches? Like how far in advance and kind of just some basic ideas there. So the basic sort of tactics for book marketing are generally speaking, it's not fundamentally different from normal content marketing, right? So what you want to do is you want to think, okay, just like when you're trying to come up with the idea for a book, what do I know that people care about?

So then just take it one step further. What's already in my book that people care about? And then the quickest, easiest way to get attention is to divide up your book into sections or to either write new material poaching from your book or just divide your book up into sections about things, right? So for instance, if you're like, go back to the plumbing book, right? Because that's one of those things that's so obvious and like you think who wants to read a plumbing book, but then I think about it like this, the five ways to know that your plumber isn't screwing you or something,

or the five questions to ask your plumber to make sure he's not screwing you. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people who would love that information, right? So you take that blog, you put those five things into a thousand word blog post and put it on whatever sort of platform or content sort of place where people go when they're thinking about plumbing or home improvement stuff. I can't think of those things off the top of my head because I live in an apartment so I have no fucking idea. But if you care about that stuff, then you're going to either Google that and that's going to be what comes up and you're going to look at that and say, oh, great material. Oh man, I really want to like, my plumbing breaks all the time.

This guy wrote a book on what you need to know about plumbing without having to be a plumber or something. That's a great book. I you need to know about plumbing without having to be a plumber or something. That's a great book. I'm going to go buy it. So that piece of content becomes an evergreen lead gen for your book. Forever now, whenever people Google, how do I know if my plumber is screwing me, whatever, your thing comes up. People read it. It's great content.

They're super excited. And if they want to know more, which will be a certain percentage of the readers, they're going to go buy the book. That's pretty basic content marketing. The other things you can do and those don't even have to be on special blogs. You can get a HuffPost account and put that on. You can put that on Medium. You can even just put that on your own blog. You're not going to get as much SEO but you can put it in all those places actually. The next thing you really want to do is you want to go to people who are curators or respected voices in your niche,

and you want to partner with them and do things with them. For example, when you launched your podcast, you probably went on a bunch of other sort of self-improvement type podcasts, right? Exactly. Right. Because all the people who are going to care about your content are already listening to these other podcasts. And so if you go on there and you blow all those people away with, man, that Lewis Howes, I didn't know who he was, but he's done all this cool shit and he had so much good advice. I'm going to go listen to his podcast." Then you become one of the curators. Now you already have your audience and you can sell whatever you want through to them because they trust you because they get good information. If you're just an author with

a one-off book, you need to find the trust agents in media that are speaking to your audience and partner with them. That's the basic, easiest thing. The other thing we teach is how to deal with media because most people can't afford a PR agent. So we have a lot of templates in the book, like exactly how to send an email to someone who works at Business Insider, New York Times. That's helpful.

Very helpful, actually. Exactly how to structure it, what to ask for, how to interact with them. We tell them how to find email addresses, how to figure out who to go after um like and basically the big the big takeaway is do all the work possible for the press person and they'll they'll be super likely to run it so well for the first thing is make sure it's an angle they care about like everyone thinks their book is interesting but it's not. It's just not really. Even stuff that sells really well is going to be only interesting to a certain number of people. Don't go after people. If someone writes about food for the New York Times, don't fucking spam

them about your self-improvement book. That's stupid. It doesn't make sense unless it centers around food and there's some angle that involves food, right? So find the people that will care and then present your material in a way that benefits them, not you. Of course, everyone knows you want to market your book. They don't care. What they care about is how your book can help them. So if I'm a reporter at Business Insider, let's say, I have to put up three or whatever, five pieces a day. If you send me, at Lewis Howes, like let's say you have a book out. If you send me something, oh, the Lewis Howes book, and you talk about it yourself, I'm like, oh, I don't give a shit. Get this email out of my inbox, right? But if you send me an email that's

like, hey, Tucker, I read your piece on where you did the five life tips that Richard Branson can teach entrepreneurs. I really liked it. It was part of the inspiration for my book. Here's an excerpt from my book. I thought you might want to run this on Business Insider. It might be interesting. Also, here's a slideshow that can go with it. And if it's like whatever, the 12 things being a pro football player can teach you about starting a business or

something, you know, I'm just like, that's good. I like that. I try to spit all like sort of ideas from your life, right? Right. Like that actually might be interesting. It might be really cool. I can actually think of three or four lessons that would be awesome, right? Right. And so like, if I look at it, I'm like, Oh, this is awesome. And I might change it a little bit, whatever. And then it's like, oh, I'm putting it up. And I put it up under my name. And if it's a really good slide share, I get 100, 200,000 views. I get a little bit of a bonus. My boss thinks I'm awesome. You did all the work, right? I didn't have to do anything. You basically sent me a story. Copy and paste it, maybe add an intro and that's it. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So the more work you do for me, the more you frame it, the more you make

it something that I think my audience will like and enjoy that will make me look good as a reporter, the more likely the reporter is to cover it. Very cool. And you got all this information in the book. So people can basically just copy and paste and tweak. So people can basically just copy and paste and tweak and – So our goal with this book is that if someone has a lot of time but not much money, they can read everything in the book. They can copy everything we do. Like we have a lot of instructions. A lot of it is complicated and takes time to learn but we walk you through all of it. Sure.

I think most people – if you're doing a book sort of as a legion for your business, you have more money than time. So most people I think would want to hire sort of me to do this or whatever. That's fine. But a lot of people have a lot of time and not much money. So what we tried to do is show the people with a lot of time how they can do all this stuff themselves. Right. Give yourself the upper hand. Exactly.

So you can go either way or with some of these things, you can maybe hire us for one small thing and then do all the rest. But the idea is – here's why we wrote this book, Lewis, to be honest. We saw all these fucking clowns writing these book marketing books who never marketed a book and didn't know shit. Or who haven't been a bestseller. Right, exactly. They've never written or marketed a bestseller in their lives and they're selling themselves as book marketing experts and it really fucking

pissed me off man especially because like one of my friends like bought one of their books and they tried all this stuff and it all failed like why didn't you come to me and they're like well you're always so fucking busy and like you know you never have time and i'm like well i am busy he's like well i can't afford this shit i'm like well just fucking ask me dude he's like, well, I am busy. He's like, well, I can't afford this shit. I'm like, well, just fucking ask me, dude. He's like, well, asshole, why don't you write this shit down first? And then I don't have to fucking ask you anymore. I can just read it. And I was like, oh, yeah, you're right. And so I wrote every – that was sort of the impetus.

And actually, we wrote this. So the book in the box idea I got from the way Ryan and I wrote this book because Ryan didn't want to write this book. He's too busy running marketing campaigns, right? He's doing it all. Exactly. So I basically made him sit down with me like three different times for an hour and I just asked him a bunch of questions about marketing. And then I already knew a bunch as well. Did you record it?

Oh, yeah. Recorded it, transcribed it, put it in outline form. You did the book in the box format. Almost exactly. it, put it in outline form. You did the book in the box format. Almost exactly. Ryan did go over this a couple times and edited it himself because he didn't want his name on something that wasn't really in his voice.

Right. So he made sure it was very much in his voice as well as mine. But I figured out and sort of tested the format for book in a box on the book marketing book. Very cool. So this just launched, though, Book in a Box. Have you tested it with other books as well? Yeah. We have a couple books that we generally speaking, we don't talk about who we do with this.

Sure, sure. Because people, they don't want everyone to know. Because there's the idea like, oh, you didn't sit down and type your book out. You didn't write it. But here's the thing. That's why we can charge $6,000 to $ down and type your book out. You didn't write it. But here's the thing. That's why we can charge $6,000 to $10,000 for this is because these aren't our ideas. These are their ideas. Just so people know about this, if you hire a ghostwriter to write a book proposal, you're spending $10,000, $20,000 minimum if they're a great writer.

If you're hiring a ghostwriter to do a book, like you said, it's like 50, 70 grand in that ballpark, right? Yep. So, I mean, if you can get the whole thing done with editing and the graphics and the cover and everything for like less than 15, I feel like that's just unbelievable. It's such a great deal. And if you can get it done by Tucker Max's team who knows how to do it and set your book up for success and selling it then it's even like next level so i mean that's incredible um man what else can we talk about here there's just so much okay give me here's what i want to know let's say someone doesn't have a lot of time and they don't have a lot of money right which is probably a lot of people

they've got three main things to focus on when their book comes out. They've written the book. It's about to come out. They're doing it themselves or they've got a publisher, whatever it may be. But they've got three main things that will give them 80% of the results that they can get. What are those two, three main things? So the biggest ROI that we found, and you can go look, I think I wrote a guest post about this on Tim Ferriss' blog.

And I know Tim has written something about this on book marketing as well. The biggest ROI are going to be niche blogs that are specifically directly in your audience's niche. For instance, Lewis, if you did a book based on your podcast that was a really good self-improvement book, the first person you should go to is Tim Ferriss. Of course. Because that's his audience, right? And if Tim likes your book and you do a guest post, you're going to sell anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 copies off of his, just off of his. One guest post, you think?

Oh, easily. Easily, dude. I think Ryan, so for Obstacle is the Way, Ryan did his audio book with Tim instead of with his publisher. for Obstacle is the Way, Ryan did his audio book with Tim instead of with his publisher. And I honestly don't know the numbers, but I do know that Ryan marketed the fuck out of Obstacle is the Way. He did. He was everywhere. Dude, he was everywhere. And it didn't really even sell that much because it's a book about stoic philosophy. It's really hard to market. I mean, Ryan did an amazing job, but that's like really to market. I know the biggest impact was when

Tim released the audiobook. I think it sold a couple thousand copies of the physical book. I'm not sure what the audiobook did. I really don't know. Probably Tim would be mad if I told you the numbers if I did know. I don't know, but I do know the audio the physical book went from something like 700 on Amazon to top 100. It went to like number 50 or something. Like in the next couple days. Yes, and it stayed there. It stayed in the hundreds for a few days. That's nuts. Yes.

Exactly, because here's the thing. Who talks about Stoic Philosophy Online? Nobody! But Tim Paris actually does. He's done it a lot. Exactly. So there's no better place for Ryan to put that book. You know what I'm saying? So there's no bigger ROI than finding the specific audience. It doesn't have to be the biggest name. It needs to be the specific audience. Then the second biggest thing I would do is figure out what are the one or two big ideas in your

book. And if you tell me there's eight big ideas, you're full of shit. You don't know your book. There are no books that there might be a few books that have eight big ideas. Like, you know, Isaac Newton's Principia and shit have eight big ideas. Okay. Like you're lucky if your book has one big idea. So if it has one big idea, figure out what that idea is and then figure out a way, multiple ways to write great pieces that talk about that idea. And then put those up other places. So Huffington Post, Reddit, Medium.

Like I was saying, the 12 things being a professional football player can do. 12 things pro football can teach you about how to run a startup or something. That's kind of a cool piece, right? Then you want to go to places like BuzzFeed and all these places and try and get that on there. Because that's how you're going to get the broadest sort of expanse, right? So one, you start with niche. Two, you start broad. And then I know that this is going to be not what people want to hear.

is going to be not what people want to hear, but I'm telling you the most important thing you can do to market a good book is to have shit to market. So you need to think ahead of time. Before you even write the book, think how am I going to market this? Who is going to care? Who is the audience? Why are they going to care about this book? How am I going to reach them? Where do I find them?

If you don't know the answers to that before you do your book. Don't write the book. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. Because I've seen a lot of people that they'll come to us with books and I'll look at them and I'm like, I wish you would come to us before you started

because there's a great idea buried in this book. But the book needs to have a different title and a different cover. You have to understand that all these are marketing decisions. Your title is a super important marketing decision. The book cover, people judge books by the cover. The cover is a super important marketing decision. How you structure the book, what the book is about, is it three short books or one huge book? All these things are major marketing decisions. And if you don't realize that ahead of time, if you cannot lay out your marketing plan, even if you're poor and you can't spend any money, you can still market a book, right?

Who cares about your book? Where is that audience? How are you going to reach them? Why are they going to care? If you can't answer those questions unless unless you don't care about making sales and getting the book out there you just want to say you have a book and be known as an author then i guess yeah then don't waste any time marketing the book right exactly no like there are a lot of people who you're exactly right lewis they want to they want to write a book because they want to be able to put it on their

speaker page and they can double their speaking fee. Totally fine. If that's your goal, just do a super professional book and don't spend one dime marketing it because it doesn't matter. Right. It doesn't. your personal life for a second and why you transition out of, uh, writing the books that you were writing about and to kind of doing what you're doing now, which is more writing about book marketing and doing the dating stuff. And also, you know, just kind of changing things around in your life. You know, when I saw you last, you have a, I don't know if you're even, you know,

public about this, but you're, you've got a, no, no, the one thing I know you're going to talk about the fact that I have a girlfriend, the thing that you're about've got a no no the one thing i know you're gonna talk i'm public about the fact i have a girlfriend the thing you're about to talk about you're not okay okay well you're you're you're kind of like taking it easy i'll say you're kind of like putting your roots you're putting your roots down and why is that and is that making you know is having a girlfriend and kind of like transitioning into other things is there a reason for that and um you know what kind of what's next for you with all this honestly man it just became one of those things where it was like there wasn't one day i woke up and i'm like oh i want to like put my roots down and have a girlfriend and get married and have a family it's just like And there you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Tucker

and all of his juicy details on how to create, market, and sell a bestseller and really how to be a successful author by yourself. Again, writing a book is challenging enough. Marketing it is even harder, but there are some key things you can do to really optimize your experience with this to get the maximum amount of copies sold. So again, make sure to go back to the show notes over at lewishouse.com slash 78 and get all the details. You're going to get a link to the book. You can go buy.

And also, if you're looking to have additional services, we'll have a link for that on there as well as how you can really get signed up and have your own book done and supported with you with Tucker's new service. Very cool. I've already sent a couple people there who are starting to use it, and they're loving it already. So, again, check out the show notes over at lewishouse.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends over on Twitter and Facebook and Google+, and post a picture on Instagram of where you are listening to this episode.

Make sure to tag Tucker. I believe he's at Tucker Max, but we'll have all of his links over at lewishouse.com slash seven eight. And please subscribe to the School of Greatness over on iTunes. The best way to share and promote this podcast is to be a subscriber to download the episodes because that's going to help the rankings in iTunes and get the word out there. I appreciate you guys so much for coming on. I hope this was a valuable episode

and you learned a lot from this episode. We're going to have Tucker back on here probably in a couple weeks with another very intimate episode on his life, his relationships, his kind of change in his life over the last couple of years, how it's evolved from what he used to be writing about to what he's doing now,

and just how the changes have affected his business, his personal life, a lot of different things, and some juicy stuff in this interview. You're going to want to make sure to subscribe so you can get access to that when it comes out. Very pumped to have him back on and share that episode with you. I think you guys are going to love it. So again, make sure to give Tucker a shout out. Go buy the book right now. For anyone looking to sell a book, write a book, you're going to want to get this book. There's nothing else out there that's better. So check it out. And it's all back over at lewishouse.com slash 78. You guys know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Outro Music